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Feral pigs, like these shown in Florida, are alarmingly growing in number in Canada.
‘Super pigs’ threaten Upper Midwest
America faces an invasion unlike any other – and it’s a “super pig” problem. The invasive swillers have adapted to survive cold climes, and they’ve been thriving in Canada and some US states. The trouble is, these piggies breed at a higher-than-normal rate, and a whole lot of the 600-pounders threaten to trot south.
The pigs pose multiple threats to local lands, including the spread of disease to both humans and other animals — a feral pig even killed a woman in Texas, and they’ve been known to bite East Coast farmers – as well as crop destruction to the tune of more than $2.5 billion worth a year.
Fighting super swine. The USDA is on the lookout for boars invading Montana and North Dakota from the Canadian prairies, and it works to track wild swine throughout the US. With the Canadian invasion looming, Minnesota lawmakers proposed a bill to centralize the reporting and responsibility for dealing with the hogs within a single agency. Connecticut state legislators, meanwhile, may create a task force to focus on the roaming livestock.
But whatever measures these states adopt, culling the population will be tough. The pigs are hard to track and reproduce so rapidly that one expert noted you could kill 65% of them and their count would still grow.Farmers stage a Delhi Chalo march over various demands, at the Punjab-Haryana Shambhu border, near Ambala on Tuesday.
Could farming protests hurt Modi at the polls?
Thousands of farmers are marching toward New Delhi to demand better prices for their crops, but police are trying to keep them out of the capital by barricading access to the city, firing tear gas, and making arrests.
The unrest comes just months before the general election in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is predicted to win a third term.
A repeat of 2021? Amid the deadly surge of COVID-19 in 2020, farmers camped out for over a year, demanding that the government revoke new agricultural laws aimed at modernizing the farming industry. The protests, which gained international attention (and a tweet from Rihanna), ended after the government agreed to repeal them.
But farmers from Haryana and Punjab say the demands — including minimum support prices, doubling income, and loan waivers — have yet to be met two years on. Over 200 participating farmer unions announced a rural strike for Friday, during which no agricultural activities will occur.
High stakes. The Modi administration has faced limited challenges to appease the majority of voters. But the farming bloc (approximately 60% of the population works in agriculture), which contributes 18% to the country’s GDP and to which Modi yielded last time, may command more of his attention.
Everything’s political: sofa, tomato, shoe
If you’re reading this column, chances are you’ll agree that at some level everything is political, right?
All around us, the things we touch, eat, buy, and wear, the people we meet, the ways we communicate – there’s a little politics in all of it. There’s the trade policy that determines where your shirt comes from. There’s the immigration policy that shapes who your kids will befriend in kindergarten or where they’ll work when they grow up. There are the decisions about war and peace that can shape life for you or for family members thousands of miles away.
So from time to time, I want to take a look around the world closer at hand, spotting the big political stories in the small objects around us. Today we’re gonna do three quickies: a sofa, a tomato, and a shoe.
Let’s go.
Your sofa: Where’s it from? If you’re in the US, chances are that for most of the past 30 years, it’s been made in China, the major exporter of furniture to North America. But if you bought it over the past year? It just might be from somewhere closer to home.
That’s because just this week México officially passed China as the US’ largest annual trade partner, taking the top spot for the first time.
That’s a big deal. China has ruled the roost for most of the past 30 years on the strength of its business-minded dictatorship and its vast, relatively cheap labor force. But in recent years, two things started to change all that. First, Donald Trump uncorked a banger of a trade war against Beijing. Then, pandemic-related lockdowns shut much of China’s economy and choked off supply chains around the world.
Companies got spooked. Investors who once prized low costs over everything began to prioritize safer shores. They began scrambling to find places not named "China" to make things to sell to the vast American market: Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. They all boomed.
But México was the big winner. After all, it’s right next to the world’s largest consumer market and has a free trade agreement with Uncle Sam (renegotiated by Trump himself, no less.)
Nowadays, the industry-heavy states of northern México are practically choking on incoming investment. The catch? A lot of it is coming from … China, as companies like, say, Man Wah – one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sofas – pile into Mexico to keep a foot in the American market.
So while you sprawl out on that sofa, ponder this: the 1990s and 2000s world of peak globalization, when companies scoured the planet for the lowest cost production, is over. We now live in a world where proximity and security matter more than cost. Get close to someone on that couch!
Tomato: Speaking of México, consider one of that country’s greatest gifts to the world: the tomato.
The once-feared fruit* didn’t make it widely to Europe until about 250 years ago – no penne al pomodoro or pan con tomate until then – but at the moment it’s a little political grenade on the continent: France and Spain have gotten into it over tomatoes in recent days.
First France said the Spanish ones were “false organic” frauds. Spain shot back that France’s were “inedible.” French farmers roughed up a Spanish tomato truck.
The issue? Paris says Spanish tomato farmers are shirking the EU’s strict rules on pesticides to flood France with cheaper produce. Spain says its own campesinos are fully following the rules and points to massive imports of cheaper Moroccan tomatoes to France as the culprit.
This is more than just a tú dices “tomate,” je dis “tomate” dispute. It echoes the larger wave of farmer protests that is roiling Europe. Across the EU, farmers are raising pitchforks against Brussels, mad about climate-conscious fuel subsidy cuts that are hurting their bottom lines at a time when their costs (for fuel and fertilizer) are already up because of the Ukraine war. Meanwhile, they’re also getting squeezed by cheaper competition from abroad.
Critics of the protests point out that European agriculture has been protected by massive subsidies for decades, and that it’s a shrinking sector of small farms and old farmers that has resisted modernization.
That may be, but no sane politician in Europe wants to be seen ignoring granddad the farmer, so governments across the continent have been rolling back subsidy cuts and icing new trade deals.
Lastly, look at your shoe. And while you’re looking at it, consider the Houthis, the Iran-backed rebel group that controls Yemen.
What could these two things possibly have to do with each other?
The answer is floating in the Red Sea, where, as you probably have heard, the Houthis have been raining drones and missiles down on commercial ships as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians under Israeli assault in Gaza. As a result, shipping companies that move goods through the Red Sea and onto the Suez Canal are rerouting around the Horn of Africa. What’s this got to do with shoes?
As my colleague John found earlier this week, fully HALF of all shoes that go to Europe travel through the Red Sea. And about 40% of all clothing. So if you see a European friend walking around with two left shoes or one bare foot – you know who to blame.
*Yes, the tomato is a fruit. Don’t shoot the messenger. If you can’t handle that, don’t let me be the one to tell you that a strawberry isn’t a berry, but an eggplant is.
German farmers protest against the cut of vehicle tax subsidies of the so-called German Ampel coalition government in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany January 8, 2024.
Farmers sow chaos across Germany
German farmers angry about fuel subsidy cuts have launched a weeklong nationwide protest, putting Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fragile center-left coalition in a bind.
Scholz’s decision to end some tax breaks and subsidies for farmers was framed as tough medicine needed to cure the government’s budgetary ailments. It came after Germany’s top court ruled last fall that the government could not, in fact, direct €60 billion in leftover pandemic funds toward climate policy initiatives.
But that immediately provoked farmers, several hundred of whom stormed a ferry carrying Scholz’s top economic deputy last week. Even a partial climbdown by the government failed to appease them, and now they’ve launched protests across the country, blocking roads and snarling commuter traffic.
Farmers say raising their production costs not only hits their pocketbooks but is also unwise at a moment when inflation is ticking up and there are fears of a broader economic recession in Europe’s largest economy. The government says it must balance its budget, in time-honored German tradition. With Scholz’s coalition polling at a truly dismal 17%, is there a good German word for wiggle room?
Meanwhile, a new (old) left model rises. A new German party combines progressive ideas on the social safety net with a harsh line on immigration and skepticism about climate policy.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, founded by a half-Iranian defector from Germany’s The Left party, says today’s leftists have traded their old interest in class issues for a new one in cultural wars, and she thinks she – along with co-founder Amira Mohamed Ali, who is half Egyptian – can blunt the rise of the surging far-right Alternative for Germany party. She has sided clearly with the framers, blasting the government for “taking money from their pockets.”.
The Alliance will face its first test in this summer’s European Parliament elections, in which right and center-right parties are expected to perform well against a backdrop of rising European misgivings about migration.
Ivorian farm workers slits cocoa pods to extract the beans in a cocoa plantation of the N'Doucy cooperative near the village of Sokorogbo.
Local farmers in Africa brace for new EU deforestation law
Under EUDR, coffee growers hoping to sell to the world’s largest economy will have to digitally map their supply chains down to the plot where the raw materials were grown, a task that could involve tracing millions of small farms in remote regions.
In Ethiopia, where some 5 million farming families rely on coffee beans, orders have been drying up in recent months. Ivory Coast – the world's largest exporter of cocoa – ships around 70% of its annual output to the EU, but half of its crop is sold by local intermediaries and thus difficult to trace.
The law could increase small-scale farmer poverty and raise prices for EU consumers, while also undermining the EUDR's impact on forest conservation, as countries like Ivory Coast are considering declassifying protected forests so that they comply with the EU regulations.
COP28: Why farmers need to be front and center in climate talks
Agriculture is the foundation of human civilization, the economic activity that makes every other endeavor possible. But historically, says International Fertilizer Association Director General Alzbeta Klein, the subject hasn't received attention in climate talks.
"It took us 23 climate conferences to start thinking about agriculture," she said during a GZERO Live event organized by the Sustainability Leaders Council, a partnership between Eurasia Group, GZERO Media, and Suntory. "The problem is that we don't know how to feed ourselves without a huge impact on the environment."
The good news is, leaders are catching on to the notion that a holistic approach is the only way forward.
Watch the full livestream conversation: The global water crisis and the path to a sustainable future
- Controversies at COP28 and the future of climate change ›
- COP28 climate talks complicated by UAE oil deals ›
- Hunger Pains: The growing global food crisis ›
- Who's to blame for sky-high food prices? ›
- Hunger Pains: The Growing Global Food Crisis - GZERO Media ›
- COP28’s challenge: growing problems, shrinking credibility ›
U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), chair of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Subcommittee chairs a hearing to examine SNAP and other nutrition assistance in the Farm Bill
The farm bill: A deadline Congress can’t blow
While everyone is freaking out about the looming US government shutdown, Congress is about to miss another major deadline: renewing the farm bill. Without it the American food system implodes.
Congress will likely push the deadline to the end of the year, putting it in the crossfire of major budget battles and potentially prolonged shutdowns. The farm bill is just as polarizing as spending negotiations, and the consequences of missing the deadline – whether now or in December – would be immediately felt by farmers and families alike.
The farm bill is where the government handles all things food. First passed in 1933, it is renewed by Congress every five years. It is responsible for crop insurance, loans, and subsidies that keep farmers in business and the US food system running. It also handles food assistance, with the largest share of funding going to SNAP benefits that help low-income families put food on the table.
If Congress doesn’t pass the farm bill, many subsidies and policies will revert back to 1940s levels. Support for dairy, for example, would revert back to minimum prices set in the original farm bill, potentially doubling the cost per gallon. The impact on inflation would be immediate and dire.
Farmers, already rattled by Chinese tariffs, rising temperatures, and increased droughts, are waiting for the bill to know what insurance the government will offer them in the face of such instability. Meanwhile, SNAP beneficiaries will not receive their benefits if the bill is not reauthorized before the deadline.
Why will it be so hard to pass? Historically, the farm bill has been a reprieve of bipartisanship. But this year's bill is expected to be the most expensive one yet. Clocking in at around $1.51 trillion over the next decade, budget hawks are threatening to shoot down the bill on its bottom line alone. A big reason for the growing price tag is expanded natural disaster insurance for agricultural commodities, as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent.
The proposed bill towers over its $867 billion predecessor from 2018, of which 80% went to SNAP benefits. Republicans want to restrict SNAP this year, raising the age that adults must be working to qualify from 49 to 55 and cutting snap spending by $30 billion over the next 10 years. Toughening work requirements is a no-go for Democrats, and neither party is looking ready to compromise.
The EATS ACT is a poison pill for passage. If welfare benefits weren't polarizing enough, Republicans from agricultural states have added the controversial Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act (EATS) to the bill. The act would negate any state laws that have an impact on other states’ agriculture industries, including measures banning pesticides, implementing animal welfare laws, or protecting consumers.
It was spurred by California’s Proposition 12, which barred the sale of pork from pregnant pigs kept in extreme confinement. The bill would overturn this and a trove of other state laws and regulations, which opponents argue is an infringement on states’ rights.
150 members of the House have urged leaders to keep the provision out of the farm bill. But with Congress distracted by budget battles, it is likely that these contentious issues won’t be dealt with until the last minute, leaving farmers and the entire US food system on shaky ground.
GZERO talked to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and Lee Johnson about their upcoming film, “Into the Weeds: Dewayne “Lee” Johnson vs. Monsanto Company,” about the complicated issue of pesticides, big business, and the health of farmers and consumers. Check out the Q&A here.